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Waking up is hard to do, but it's easier with NPR's Morning Edition. Hosts Renée Montagne, Steve Inskeep, and David Greene bring the day's stories and news to radio listeners on the go. Morning Edition provides news in context, airs thoughtful ideas and commentary, and reviews important new music, books, and events in the arts. All with voices and sounds that invite listeners to experience the stories. Morning Edition is a world of ideas tailored to fit into your busy life.

The latest protests began when Egypt's military tried to strengthen its own power in any future government. Egypt's military is hardly the only army to assume an outsized role in a supposedly democratic country.

And we're going to talk about that with Vali Nasr of Tufts University, author of "The Rise of Islamic Capitalism" and a former advisor to the Obama administration. He's in our studios. Good morning, Vali.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are winding down. That means more troops will be coming home. Jobs are tough to find these days for anyone, but especially for veterans. Yesterday President Obama signed into law a plan meant to get more vets hired. NPR's Rachel Martin has more.

RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: The unemployment rate for veterans is around 12 percent - that's close to four points higher than for everyone else. President Obama says it's time to do something about it.

And I'm Steve Inskeep. Congress threatened itself with punishment if it failed to act. Lawmakers promised automatic spending cuts if a special committee failed to reduce the deficit. Now that they have failed, some want a way out of the punishment with which they had threatened themselves. This may be just one more episode in a long fight over taxes and spending, as we hear from NPR's Ari Shapiro.

Hewlett-Packard announced its quarterly earnings were down 90 percent from the previous quarter. The company is going through big changes. It just spent most of its cash on an acquisition, took on $4 billion of debt and named Meg Whitman as the new CEO.

The jobs website Careerbuilder.com reports nearly one in five workers said they plan to celebrate the holiday with coworkers. The survey asked workers who they would rather spend Thanksgiving with, and only 1 percent answered coworkers. Ninety percent said family. The remaining 9 percent answered neither.

MF Global is the securities firm run by Wall Street veteran and former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine. The firm filed for bankruptcy protection last month after making bad bets on European government bonds. A trustee was appointed to wind down the company.

Lawmakers have spent much of this year struggling to reach a deal that could get budget deficits under control. But the problem has been developing for at least a decade.

Young voters might not be familiar with the government of the year 2000 — at least not by its balance sheet. The economy: booming. Tax revenue: rolling in. Expenses for war: none. And to top it off, there was a $200 billion surplus.

Director Michel Hazanavicius met me at the Bradbury building in downtown L.A. It's the location of a key scene in his audacious new movie The Artist, which takes place just at the moment when talking pictures supersede silent films.

"It's mythic," said Hazanavicius of the era during which Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were stars.

In the scene shot here, a dashing film star reminiscent of Fairbanks bumps into his lovely young protégé on the building's remarkable staircase. He's on his way down; she's on her way up.

Neil Parry was arrested at an airport in Darwin, Australia, and was accused of stuffing drugs into bottles of shampoo. Parry spent three days in jail, but has now received $100,000 in compensation. Testing of the bottles of Pantene shampoo and conditioner showed they actually contained: just shampoo and conditioner.

Video shot by Occupy protesters shows people linking arms and sitting down to block a sidewalk on the campus of California Davis. A campus police officer steps up with an oversized spray can and calmly douses them with pepper spray. Two campus police officers have been placed on administrative leave, the university says.

Spain is the latest country to change its government over Europe's economic crisis. In a parliamentary election yesterday, Spaniards voted overwhelmingly to toss out the socialists who have ruled for almost eight years. They brought in Mariano Rajoy, leader of the conservative Popular Party.

We take a lot of products and technology for granted, like bar codes, compact discs, even cruise control on cars. These products and hundreds of others would not exist if not for a non-profit whose name few people are familiar with. It's called Battelle Memorial Institute. It's one of the world's largest independent research and development groups. It's based in Central Ohio. Niala Boodhoo of the Midwest reporting project Changing Gears takes us to Columbus to a place where hundreds of companies go for R&D.

India is celebrating the birth of a baby to two of its biggest Bollywood stars. Commentator Sandip Roy explains why the birth is making headlines.

Last week, India got the tweet it was holding its breath for: It's a girl.

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, the Bollywood actress often called the most beautiful woman in the world, gave birth to a daughter. The proud dad, Abhishek Bachchan, a Bollywood hero in his own right, sent out the first tweet. Followed moments later by his dad, Bollywood's biggest superstar, Amitabh Bachchan.

Sound Stage 28 at Universal Studios in Burbank, Calif., looks like any other Hollywood set — littered with wires, crew members everywhere. We pick our way through cables and cameras and stuff that would make Oscar the Grouch's trash can look tidy.

But then we head up — up a flight of wooden stairs that leads to the old set of the 1925 Lon Chaney silent film The Phantom of the Opera. It's draped with dusty red-velvet swags, and it looks like it might still harbor a ghost or two.

In these hard times, Britain's Royal Academy of Chemistry has come up with the cheapest meal of all: a toast sandwich. They found the recipe in the Victorian bestseller: Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management. It's a piece of toast between two buttered slices of bread and costs 12 cents to make.

Good morning, I'm Renee Montagne. The Columbia University Marching Band is known for its sense of humor, but their joke fell flat at a recent football game against Cornell. In a parody of the school fight song, the band sang: We always lose, lose, lose by a lot; sometimes, by a little - which is accurate. Their loss to Cornell was their ninth straight this year.

The athletic department wasn't amused. They banned the marching band from the final game of the season. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Let's consider now, those vehicles that offer something really cheap - the food trucks that have become so popular. At the L.A. Auto Show, Nissan has on display a new truck specially designed for mobile restaurateurs. Our last word in business today is: culinary concept car.

The Los Angeles Auto Show begins today. It's the first of America's car shows and it's where manufacturers put their best foot forward or try to reinvent themselves. One those carmakers is Honda. Honda's production was badly hurt by Japan's earthquake and tsunami, and as it was getting back on track, the floods in Thailand crippled production again. But as NPR's Sonari Glinton reports from the L.A. Auto Show, natural disasters may be the least of Honda's problems.

NPR's business news starts with oil prices hovering around $99 a barrel. Oil has gone up sharply since last month, partly because of signs of improvement in the U.S. economy. Also because of tensions in some oil producing regions, which could affect supplies. Still, the debt crisis in Europe is holding prices below that psychologically important $100 a barrel mark. Benchmark crude was trading in Asia this morning at about $98.90. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Italy's new prime minister has pledged far-reaching reforms. An economist himself, Mario Monti has managed to win a vote of confidence for his new national unity government by an overwhelming majority in Italy's senate. Still, Europe's debt crisis is gathering more steam and now pushing borrowing costs for Spain and France sharply higher. As NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports, pressure is mounting on the European Central Bank to act to stem the crisis.

The outcome in Italy is, of course, of huge importance to Germany. Germany is the strongest economy in the eurozone and has a deep historical interest in the euro's success. We asked the economist Nicolas Veron to remind us of Germany's role in this grand monetary experiment.